Physiologists define stress as how the body reacts to a stressor, real or imagined, a stimulus that causes stress. Acute stressors affect an organism in the short term; chronic stressors over the longer term. The general adaptation syndrome (GAS), developed by Hans Selye, is a profile of how organisms respond to stress; GAS is characterized by three phases: a nonspecific mobilization phase, which promotes sympathetic nervous system activity; a resistance phase, during which the organism makes efforts to cope with the threat; and an exhaustion phase, which occurs if the organism fails to overcome the threat and depletes its physiological resources.
[71]

Alarm
is the first stage, which is divided into two phases: the
shock
phase and the
antishock
phase.
[72]

Resistance
is the second stage and increased secretion of glucocorticoids play a major role, intensifying the systemic response—they have lipolytic, catabolic and antianabolic effects: increased glucose, fat and amino acid/protein concentration in blood. Moreover, they cause lymphocytopenia, eosinopenia, neutrophilia and polycythemia. In high doses, cortisol begins to act as a mineralocorticoid (aldosterone) and brings the body to a state similar to
hyperaldosteronism
. If the stressor persists, it becomes necessary to attempt some means of coping with the stress. Although the body begins to try to adapt to the strains or demands of the environment, the body cannot keep this up indefinitely, so its resources are gradually depleted.

The current usage of the word
stress
arose out of
Selye
's 1930s experiments. He started to use the term to refer not just to the agent but to the state of the organism as it responded and adapted to the environment. His theories of a universal non-specific stress response attracted great interest and contention in academic
physiology
and he undertook extensive research programs and publication efforts.
[73]

A packed room of more than 500 vendors, industry associations and civilian and military stakeholders likely left with more questions than answers when it comes to the Defense Department’s new cloud initiative.

Brig. Gen. David Krumm repeatedly emphasized JEDI is not an IT system or an IT contract.

“This is effort by all of DoD,” Krumm said yesterday in Arlington, Virginia. “The Joints Requirements Oversight Council…has defined the requirements for this project. Let there be no doubt these requirements are demanding. They are tough and they are what we need to kick start DoD into using the cloud. We need you to look at this from the warfighters’ lens, which is what I want you to take out of today, this is not an IT project. We need availability, with no single points of failure across a diverse geographic landscape, which means across an austere or connectivity challenged areas across the globe.”

Chris Lynch, the director of the Defense Digital Service, said JEDI is foundational for DoD to build better capabilities and meet the warfighters’ needs.

“We have three goals for JEDI. We want to bend DoD around the commercial cloud not the other way around. We want it here and out in austere environments. We will bring capabilities to the warfighter. We have failed if we do not do that,” he said. “We must offer foundational blocks. Those that give us the ability to experiment with new things we have yet to anticipate. We need compute, network, storage and security that gives us the ability to play.”

The third goal is for JEDI to be more than a data center, but provide better monitoring, failovers, scalability and access to new and emerging technology such as artificial intelligence.

Krumm and Lynch’s aspirational goals soon floated back to reality when the JEDI Cloud program manager Lt. Col. Kaight Meyers, Capt. Dave McAllister, of DoD’s Strategic Capabilities Office, and Chanda Brooks, the JEDI contracting officer, all reverted back to the old style of DoD thinking that is perspective and requirements based.

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